I frequently grapple with the tension between the limitations of a journalist’s role and the narrative authority that they are given. On one hand, being a journalist often means you are a visitor to the topic or community you are writing about. Even if I were to traverse the entirety of the Darien Gap myself, for example — exhaustion, food insecurity, and threats to violence included — to report on the stories of the migrants fleeing their home countries, that does not mean that I faced the same kind of political or economic violence that drove me to the desperation of a life-threatening escape, nor does it mean that I will understand the implications of a life afterwards. At the same time, ‘good journalism’ often seems defined by a kind of adjacency to authenticity. The ‘closer’ you are to portraying the reality of the lives you depict, the ‘better’ journalist you are. But any kind of journalist who claims ‘true’ authenticity, I think, is embellishing: there is only so much you can understand about something you are clearly not.

I think, though, that attempting to understand a life you will always be a stranger to is a valuable cause, not only because it provides the groundwork for good journalism, but because that is the very precondition of a healthy society that appears to be lacking in today’s political atmosphere. Take Caitlin Dickerson’s What I Saw in the Darien Gap: her embedded journalism brings her to multiple families undertaking the dangerous trek. From the relatively temporary and fragmentary encounters, Dickerson creates a patchwork for a whole. She puts into contrast the stories of these individuals with the wider political context of changing immigration policies in the Americas. I think Dickerson is well aware that she could never portray the full realities of the countless lives that are featured in her story. But her visceral descriptions and observations on the trail are only made available through her presence, and they build the contrast between the sterile bureaucracy that treat migrants as statistics and the harrowing stories of the migrants themselves. 

Madeleine Baran’s In the Dark Season 3 shows, though, that geographically embedded journalism is not an imperative (although, to some degree, I think it’s enabled by the fact that Baran’s work is primarily investigative and based on the past as opposed to Dickerson’s piece, which was more narrative and present). Baran approaches the Haditha massacres with a level of journalistic rigor that I didn’t think was humanly possible — thousands of FOIAs, hundreds of interviews, scouring the darkest and ugliest corners of the internet over the course of 4 years. While Baran does travel to Haditha for the project, the bulk of her research rests on interviews and data from the U.S. I would hesitate to say that Baran’s work is not a form of embedded journalism — Baran puts herself directly in front of the primary actors of the Haditha incident, visiting the homes of the marines, enduring harassment, etc. Which is to say, I think embedded journalism in the age of social media and OSINT can look very different from what embedded journalism looked like 10, 20 years ago.